Squid Flicks: My Dinner with Andre

Title: My Dinner with Andre

Director: Louis Malle

Original Release: October 11, 1981

My Overall Rating: 3 stars out of 5

via Amazon

Two friends meet for dinner at a New York City restaurant.  Wally is a struggling playwright.  Andre is a former theatre director who left the business a few years before to embark on a journey of self-discovery.  They talk.  Andre tells Wally all about his wild adventures.  Wally parries with his love for the simple life he lives with his wife in the city.  Wally looks at New York with new perspective on his cab ride home.

Really, that's more or less it.

My Dinner with Andre is one of the all-time classics of independent cinema.  One can't help but admire the simplicity - made on a shoestring $475,000.  It made 10 times that at the box office which is outstanding for any film.  The two lead actors also wrote the screenplay.  A grand total of five characters get spoken lines with 99% of the dialogue going to the long-winded Andre and the more reflective Wally.  Practically all of the movie is shot at the one restaurant table.

Critics fell in love with it.  Roger Ebert himself tabbed it as the #1 film of 1981.  Over the years, homages have popped up on Animaniacs, Frasier, The Simpsons, The Family Guy, Rick and Morty, Community and on and on.  44 years later, you really can't call yourself a proper movie geek if you've never seen it.

Until this month, I had never watched it.  Perhaps I've finally earned my merit badge.

Did I enjoy the movie?  You've got to get invested in the dialogue because that's truly all there is.  I can't deny, my mind wandered.  Within seconds, Andre reveals himself as a boring narcissist who believes everything he does could only be fascinating to anyone else.  I know people like that.  I don't enjoy them.  So as amusing as his story is, he lost me quickly.  I had far more sympathy for Wally's resistance.  

My first question in giving a film a rating is would I watch it again?  To be honest, I feel I would need to watch it again to appreciate it.  But would I have the patience for that?  Hard to say.  A 4 would be a definite yes.  So call it a high 3.  

One fun story for the road:  Wallace Shawn was cast as Vizzini in The Princess Bride entirely on the strength of the way he said the word "inconceivable" in My Dinner with Andre.  The word is, of course, Vizzini's catchphrase.